HP Drives Cost Out Of Managing User Identities Through OpenView Identity Management Suite; Customers Engaged With HP Achieve Reduced IT Costs and Improved Management over Risk and Compliance Efforts

Business Wire, March 23, 2006

LONDON -- HP (NYSE, Nasdaq: HPQ) has today announced that customers across Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) are increasingly choosing its OpenView Identity Management (IdM) suite to automate internal and external user access within a controlled and secure environment. As a result, customers are experiencing dramatically reduced costs in user management provisioning along with improved compliance-related IT processes.

In just 12 months, HP's IdM suite sales have more than doubled due to increased customer focus on identity management and related strategic acquisitions.

"HP's practical, automated approach to identity management is helping customers attain up to 68 percent cost savings in user management and nearly 50 percent cost savings in overall IT support(1)," said Andy Isherwood, vice president and general manager, Software Business, HP EMEA. "Our IdM software suite, combined with expertise from HP Services, enables organisations to structure business services that model real world processes and organisations, offering real ROI in the form of increased productivity and reduced IT administration costs."

Additionally, recent Bloor Research(2) cites HP as a visionary in the identity management market, well-positioned with strong provisioning, federation and audit capabilities that address customer needs in a range of sectors including financial, telecommunications, government and manufacturing.

HP's IdM suite automates control over users and their relationships to IT, thus synchronising business processes and IT services. The solution goes beyond simple user access and security by integrating into other strategic areas including IT Service Management (ITSM) and Software Configuration Management while supporting Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). In addition, customers can obtain support for their IdM implementation through HP Services from the initial inception of the project to ongoing operation and support. HP Services has 69,000 services professionals worldwide and a proven methodology for the design and implementation of identity management and complex, business-critical infrastructure solutions.

Evidence of these achievements can be found in the following recent customer successes:

Finnish telecommunications company, Elisa engaged HP to support its drive to decrease operational costs while increasing customer service through its internet portal environment. Now, customers are empowered to make decisions about levels of service and product offerings from Elisa directly online, rather than calling a helpdesk.

Speaking on the solution, Mika Vainio, head of ITC Services for Elisa commented, "HP's Openview IdM product is a critical enabler within this project. It helps us to deliver secure access to a customer service portal that offers a greater and faster level of service while simultaneously decreasing costs and increasing our competitive advantage."

Siemens Transportation Systems (STS), provider of turnkey solutions for mass transit and mainline applications within Germany, is working with HP to support secure, timely and reliable access to critical information across a worldwide network of customers, employees, partners and suppliers. Using the HP OpenView IdM suite, STS has enhanced its global security standards, reduced administrator workloads and significantly reduced the company's total cost of ownership.

"This has been a totally positive experience," said Wolfgang Gries, director I&C Technology, STS. "Today our user administration for the intranet/extranet, which comprises some 70 web applications, runs entirely on HP OpenView IdM products and functions seamlessly and without problems."

NOB Cross media facilities, a well-known facilitator of public broadcasting in the Netherlands, partnered with HP to eliminate reliance on traditional videotape by creating a digital archiving and content management platform.

HP supplied the critical SAN infrastructure to deliver fast access and digital streaming for current programming, as well as HP OpenView IdM solutions (including web-based single sign-on capabilities for a seamless user experience) and HP integration services.

Results include faster access to programming and archived material, a single comprehensive view of information resources, increased reliability and frequency of critical backups, less quality degradation than traditional video tape, all while positioning NOB to take advantage of increasing demand for streaming content and other evolving distribution methodologies.

And when Stockholm County Council, Stockholms Lans Landsting (SLL) (Sweden), required a single entry portal for all of its healthcare applications, it turned to HP. The technology used to fulfil this significant project includes Openview IdM products, HP Consulting and Integration services and Integrity servers. Benefits will include decreased costs, a simplified work environment, reduced administration and lower maintenance.

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, global services, business and home computing, and imaging and printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended Jan. 31, 2006, HP revenue totaled $87.9 billion. More information about HP (NYSE, Nasdaq: HPQ) is available at www.hp.com.